https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/Wh/ch/C2L6VZ7WHFLO.PNGJiveThe Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Know Before You Buy Jive-x2017-09-29T21:52:27.061ZWe initially set up Jive-x to be our external support-deflection and customer education community. So, it pretty much touches all customers throughout the life cycle of the customer. The community was under User Assistance when I came on board two years ago. About six months ago, it was moved (as was I) to Product Marketing. Now we are adding a product blog to the platform to communicate with customers and potential customers about the company products. And it has some internal use, as well. I'm a real community evangelist. I have found ways to get other departments into the community and to get value from the spend on it. For example, HR is experimenting with using it to communicate with employees internally. And our Support team has a private space where support techs can suggest and vote on training. I also have several private spaces where we interact with Nintex Partners as we get feedback on software betas before we go to market. Some are for marketing viability, some are for feedback on the functionality of the product itself. We also have training materials in there for customers as well as product downloads. So, if you're a Nintex customer, you should be using the community no matter where you are in your experience with Nintex.,Jive-x does ask and answer very well. It's a great platform to allow people to pose questions and to allow others to provide their thoughts very easily.
Jive's internal search function is quite good. Google can tell you WHAT is inside the community. But if you use the internal search capability, you get context. For example, you will see that what you're looking for is an answered question or an unanswered question, or a blog post or a document. That's a big value and potential time-saver. Google can't tell you that.
Jive is good at providing access to the JiveWorks community for community managers. I have many criticism of how that's organized, but at least it's there and searchable and has real value to help you figure out how to fix problems that arise. And problems will arise.,Jive could do a better job of providing parity with its on-prem product in terms of features and in terms of making tiles on par with widgets. They basically quit developing for widgets and then stopped at a basic set of tiles.
Jive has some good health metrics built in, but the reporting tools need to be way more robust. It shouldn't require an API call to get information on which pages have the most likes or which customers have the most followers, or that sort of data. And they need to make the views/pageviews match the way Google Analytics reports them so it's honest data.
They need to improve the Data Export Service, which is opaque, klunky and hard to use. If CMs are required to use it to get important metrics, it needs to be MUCH easier, less time consuming.,7,Just on support-case deflection alone, I estimate we save a couple million dollars. That's an estimate, but if even a small fraction of the people who view correct answers do not file a support ticket, then we've saved a lot of money.
I can't point to a direct number, but because customers can get product download access in our community, it saves employee time/effort providing that individually.
It's created a link between our sales people via their blogs, saving them time in answering the same questions over and over again. It helps close sales when we can point to customer success content and features and capabilities content.,Lithium Online Communities, Salesforce Communities, Higher Logic, Vanilla Forums and Discourse,Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 365, Skype for BusinessVerified UserJive transformed our Marketing/Sales/Fulfillment/Customer Service "engine" to unify the experience of a prospect-turned-customer literally overnight. We're talking tricycle-to-space shuttle transformation here.2016-02-19T20:27:29.327ZJive was used to collaborate between our sales and marketing teams and our customer service and ops teams. So it was used across multiple departments. While we were a small to midsize company, we were incredibly siloed and needed a way to bring multiple teams together during the pre-sales/sales/post-sales/fulfillment aspect of bringing on board enterprise type accounts. Jive was critical towards assuring the baton did not get dropped as the "client experience" changed hands/departments.,Simple. Intuitive for non-techies like myself.
Real-time and easy to access.
Optimized across multiple platforms, mobile devices, etc.
Excellent reporting and visibility on usage and effectiveness.,We were using Jive while they were developing the product at a rapid pace...and the updates and enhancements became frustrating to re-learn a commonly used feature. But these challenges were understood (and almost welcomed) due to the needs Jive was addressing at break-neck speed.
The reporting functionality at times was frustrating to extrapolate the data we needed.
We eventually abandoned connecting to our SharePoint servers due to many frustrating problems (admittedly probably most of them were due to internal lack of expertise). However, as I've been tracking Jive's upgrades over the years...it looks like they have dramatically improved the SharePoint connectivity to the point where it now seems to be a strong-point.,8,Hard to quantify the results...but I also left the company before we had built a mature instance of Jive in-house so the final results/impact were yet to be fully realized and measured.
The use of Jive brought together multiple-departments for the first time in our 50+ year old company to truly build an "end-to-end" approach to our marketing/sales/fulfillment/customer service engine. It was truly phenomenal to watch how the internal life-cycle of a prospect-turned-customer literally transformed and unified our inter-departmental teams through the use of Jive Engage.,Zoho CRM, HubSpot, MindManager, Engage121Corey WillixCollaboration in a Large Asian Insurer2014-05-27T16:11:32.496ZWe use Jive Engage across the whole company in many different markets in Asia/Pac. It is used for project management, knowledge repository, employee engagement and corporate communications. Our platform which we call WAVE allows us to reach out across geographical boundaries to help make our large organisation feel small. It helps to bring in the family from New Zealand to connect them more personally with the relatives in Taiwan. Jive allows us to get around e-mail size limitations to collaborate on large files between regions and Group Office. Some of the actuarial valuation spreadsheets and data files can be huge! Jive has also allowed to better integrate new acquisitions within a country with focused employee engagement activities.,I write these from the perspective of the Community Manager - You can choose your level of moderation on Jive to match the policies of your organisation. From full on content pre-moderation to to completely reactive moderation, you can take your pick. We chose the latter end of the spectrum, trust your colleagues to be professional and you will be rewarded with professional content.
The ability for users to set up their own groups very easily with out the need to revert to developers is great as this allows individuality. This allows for organic growth with out impact on the budgets of departments and teams to get their work done on Jive. The option is always there to get 'someone in to fancy it up a bit' however you will find that your own people will develop those skills themselves. Your users will also learn from each other and you should actively encourage stealing of best practice from across your organisation.
The knowledge repository or Question and Answer features are the most value-adding for me. Having searchable history that allows your to get answers quickly so the next question can be asked is the reason why you should have a collaboration platform in the first place, Jive makes that easy.
Single Sign On has been a excellent addition for us, if Jive does not make your colleagues lives easier then they won't use it.
You can customize and brand Jive to reflect your company identity.,It is difficult to create and add your own customized apps and widgets we have found. From a user perspective things like creating a survey app has proven problematic to integrate into Jive. There are OOB solutions available but they are quite expensive especially when you apply a per user/per month fee to a company of our size. Everyone is watching the bottom line.
Ironically the ability to customize every group layout has thrown up its own issues with engagement. No two groups look the same and as such it is sometimes difficult for the late adopters to get a sense of where to find things on each page. We have gone down the road of creating templates so that some uniformity is introduced to the look and feel.
It is sometimes troublesome to get a resolution to issues as the Jive platform is constantly moving forward with new features and the developer pool is small. This is exacerbated by the time zone differences between Asia and America.
As of writing there is no Data Centre in Asia which was announced at the JiveWorld conference in 2013. I have a large number of users in China so have the data nearer to them would be a great boost to access speed which can be slow especially in China.
The analytics on my version are poor, there is no number for unique views of pages and groups so it can be difficult to gauge actual usage.
For non-power users, frequent training and reminders are required to ensure momentum especially as this software is new to them. Embedding a culture of collaboration is a long road.,8,More ease in sharing vital information and learning across the wide geographical footprint our company has.
Gradually changing the culture of what has traditionally been a large conservative insurer to collaborative sharing of knowledge and insight.
Making the company feel small again and the implications of that in becoming a more agile and innovative company.,,8,Yes,9,Yes,While developing our own apps Jive gave us over and above the standard to try and help us to deliver. I am grateful to them for this help.,Asking questions and finding out if someone has asked before.
Community Manager reports are easy to use.
Finding documents,Creating more complex workflow for project work and decisions made
Creating multiple BAU reports for metric recording
The main Activity stream is unappealing and puts users off.,Yes,8Robert Crozier

We initially set up Jive-x to be our external support-deflection and customer education community. So, it pretty much touches all customers throughout the life cycle of the customer. The community was under User Assistance when I came on board two years ago. About six months ago, it was moved (as was I) to Product Marketing. Now we are adding a product blog to the platform to communicate with customers and potential customers about the company products. And it has some internal use, as well. I'm a real community evangelist. I have found ways to get other departments into the community and to get value from the spend on it. For example, HR is experimenting with using it to communicate with employees internally. And our Support team has a private space where support techs can suggest and vote on training. I also have several private spaces where we interact with Nintex Partners as we get feedback on software betas before we go to market. Some are for marketing viability, some are for feedback on the functionality of the product itself. We also have training materials in there for customers as well as product downloads. So, if you're a Nintex customer, you should be using the community no matter where you are in your experience with Nintex.

Jive-x does ask and answer very well. It's a great platform to allow people to pose questions and to allow others to provide their thoughts very easily.

Jive's internal search function is quite good. Google can tell you WHAT is inside the community. But if you use the internal search capability, you get context. For example, you will see that what you're looking for is an answered question or an unanswered question, or a blog post or a document. That's a big value and potential time-saver. Google can't tell you that.

Jive is good at providing access to the JiveWorks community for community managers. I have many criticism of how that's organized, but at least it's there and searchable and has real value to help you figure out how to fix problems that arise. And problems will arise.

Jive could do a better job of providing parity with its on-prem product in terms of features and in terms of making tiles on par with widgets. They basically quit developing for widgets and then stopped at a basic set of tiles.

Jive has some good health metrics built in, but the reporting tools need to be way more robust. It shouldn't require an API call to get information on which pages have the most likes or which customers have the most followers, or that sort of data. And they need to make the views/pageviews match the way Google Analytics reports them so it's honest data.

They need to improve the Data Export Service, which is opaque, klunky and hard to use. If CMs are required to use it to get important metrics, it needs to be MUCH easier, less time consuming.

Jive-x is great for external communities for support deflection or customer communication and document sharing/editing. If you spend the money on the available add-ons and integrations, you could use it for customer education/learning. It's less appropriate for use as a revenue -generating tool or a lead-generating platform.

Jive was used to collaborate between our sales and marketing teams and our customer service and ops teams. So it was used across multiple departments. While we were a small to midsize company, we were incredibly siloed and needed a way to bring multiple teams together during the pre-sales/sales/post-sales/fulfillment aspect of bringing on board enterprise type accounts. Jive was critical towards assuring the baton did not get dropped as the "client experience" changed hands/departments.

We were using Jive while they were developing the product at a rapid pace...and the updates and enhancements became frustrating to re-learn a commonly used feature. But these challenges were understood (and almost welcomed) due to the needs Jive was addressing at break-neck speed.

The reporting functionality at times was frustrating to extrapolate the data we needed.

We eventually abandoned connecting to our SharePoint servers due to many frustrating problems (admittedly probably most of them were due to internal lack of expertise). However, as I've been tracking Jive's upgrades over the years...it looks like they have dramatically improved the SharePoint connectivity to the point where it now seems to be a strong-point.

I think it is best suited for sales and marketing teams and customer service teams, and then for the customers to collaborate on various challenges to represent a "single voice" to the vendor on what product issues need to be addressed most urgently.

We use Jive Engage across the whole company in many different markets in Asia/Pac. It is used for project management, knowledge repository, employee engagement and corporate communications. Our platform which we call WAVE allows us to reach out across geographical boundaries to help make our large organisation feel small. It helps to bring in the family from New Zealand to connect them more personally with the relatives in Taiwan. Jive allows us to get around e-mail size limitations to collaborate on large files between regions and Group Office. Some of the actuarial valuation spreadsheets and data files can be huge! Jive has also allowed to better integrate new acquisitions within a country with focused employee engagement activities.

I write these from the perspective of the Community Manager - You can choose your level of moderation on Jive to match the policies of your organisation. From full on content pre-moderation to to completely reactive moderation, you can take your pick. We chose the latter end of the spectrum, trust your colleagues to be professional and you will be rewarded with professional content.

The ability for users to set up their own groups very easily with out the need to revert to developers is great as this allows individuality. This allows for organic growth with out impact on the budgets of departments and teams to get their work done on Jive. The option is always there to get 'someone in to fancy it up a bit' however you will find that your own people will develop those skills themselves. Your users will also learn from each other and you should actively encourage stealing of best practice from across your organisation.

The knowledge repository or Question and Answer features are the most value-adding for me. Having searchable history that allows your to get answers quickly so the next question can be asked is the reason why you should have a collaboration platform in the first place, Jive makes that easy.

Single Sign On has been a excellent addition for us, if Jive does not make your colleagues lives easier then they won't use it.

It is difficult to create and add your own customized apps and widgets we have found. From a user perspective things like creating a survey app has proven problematic to integrate into Jive. There are OOB solutions available but they are quite expensive especially when you apply a per user/per month fee to a company of our size. Everyone is watching the bottom line.

Ironically the ability to customize every group layout has thrown up its own issues with engagement. No two groups look the same and as such it is sometimes difficult for the late adopters to get a sense of where to find things on each page. We have gone down the road of creating templates so that some uniformity is introduced to the look and feel.

It is sometimes troublesome to get a resolution to issues as the Jive platform is constantly moving forward with new features and the developer pool is small. This is exacerbated by the time zone differences between Asia and America.

As of writing there is no Data Centre in Asia which was announced at the JiveWorld conference in 2013. I have a large number of users in China so have the data nearer to them would be a great boost to access speed which can be slow especially in China.

The analytics on my version are poor, there is no number for unique views of pages and groups so it can be difficult to gauge actual usage.

For non-power users, frequent training and reminders are required to ensure momentum especially as this software is new to them. Embedding a culture of collaboration is a long road.

Our version has some limits which have been overcome in newer releases of Jive with better workflow processes and plugins. It is clear that you need to be on the public cloud version as this will lower future costs however this limits you in terms of customization. So to make the case for a cloud version, you get the automatic upgrades with the upgrade costs attached to hosted versions.

Jive-x Scorecard Summary

About Jive-x

Jive-x (formerly Jive Engage) is Jive's external facing community platform for prospects and customers. It is a leading product in the space and most often competes with Lithium Community and Telligent Community.